James Bannan16 December 2008, 10:00 PM
Want to check out Vista without migrating off XP? Virtualization is the key and our step-by-step tutorial is the answer.
Page 1 - Intro
Step 1 - Prepare Your System
In this tutorial we're going to virtualize Vista Home Premium SP1 x86 using Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0.2. To prepare for this tutorial you need to download Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0.2 (available here - choose the installer package appropriate for your platform).
We chose Vista Home Premium SP1 x86 as the virtual guest, but this tutorial works just the same for any other version of Vista.
This tutorial was tested on an Acer TravelMate 5620 running Windows XP Professional SP3 x86. This tutorial will work equally well on Windows XP Home Edition, and also on either the 32-bit or 64-bit editions of either builds (subject to hardware requirements - read below).
Before going down the virtualization path, you should make sure that the system which will act as the host has sufficient resources to run both its own operating system as well as all the virtual machines you're planning to run.
Running virtualized desktop operating systems isn't particularly processor intensive, so really any relatively up-to-date CPU should be able to handle it. Obviously processors with more than one processing core is beneficial, as are CPUs which support Intel-VT or AMD-V.
RAM and disk performance and availability are the most essential components. You really want to be able to run both the host and guest OSes within physical memory. As soon as physical RAM is full and spills over to the page file, hard drive performance will decrease dramatically, adversely affecting both systems. Therefore, on a system running Windows XP as the host you really need at least 1GB RAM to make virtualization worthwhile. Obviously the more RAM the better, but if you've got 4GB available then you will really need to install a 64-bit version of XP to get the most out of it.
Hard drive performance is also a major factor, as the virtual guest will be completely dependent on it. You shouldn't attempt to host the virtual hard drive of the guest system on a hard drive slower than 7200rpm, so laptop users should verify their hardware first. You can use an external USB 2.0 or Firewire hard drive, but certain intensive disk operations like creating the virtual disk, formatting it or copying large amounts of files around will chew up the available bus bandwidth and performance will be affected. Finally, if you host the entire virtual guest on the primary partition of the host, fragmentation will occur and affect both systems. So keep the partition defragged and reap the performance benefits.
The last word of warning is that it's important to remember that your system will be running two operating systems, so resource management becomes very important. For example, it's not a good idea to encode video while running a live VM unless you have some serious processing power to hand. It's worthwhile to fire up the Performance monitor in Windows XP to see under what sort of loads your system is running. To access the Performance monitor, right-click the Start Bar, select Task Manager and go the Performance tab. You want to keep your eye on the "CPU Usage" and "Memory" graphs.